Entries by dan barker

There have been lots of articles over the last week or so talking about “fake news” on Facebook, many revolving around the US election. The ‘poster child’ of Facebook Fake News is this post: “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead…“. It appeared a few days before the US presidential election, and was […]

This post simply includes 2 pieces of information: Answers to the question “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” from the weekend immediately prior to the referendum, and answers to the same question, surveyed on 23rd August 2016 (ie. exactly 2 months after the referendum). Responses […]

“What would happen if you reran the UK’s “in/out” EU Referendum today, having seen the news headlines immediately following the announcement of the result?” I am sure many have asked the question. As you will surely know: It is not possible to answer with anything even approaching a rough degree of certainty. However, I have […]

Here is the result of a poll run on a sample of 2,000 UK web users, carried out online between the 18th & 21st June 2016. Demographic data was collected for 1485 of those responses. Below you’ll find: An overall summary result. Results excluding ‘undecided’ voters. Split by age. Split by gender. Data was gathered […]

The BBC are apparently removing thousands of recipes from their website. This has been announced, slightly clumsily, in a leak in early May, and then more officially by the BBC themselves. This blog post takes a look at what happened, and ends by looking at the possible motivations that may have caused the BBC to communicate […]

Twitter and Google regularly do something that – if you or I did it – would be breaking the law. They reveal the identities of people who courts have decided should not be named. If newspapers and members of the general public name them, there are very serious repercussions. Yet Google & Twitter’s algorithms seem free to […]

Just over 3 years ago I wrote a post about 2 algorithms that appeared to be doing something that – if you or I did it – would break the law: Google’s image search algorithm and Twitter’s keyword search algorithm. At that time, they were displaying pictures of one of the killers of Jamie Bulger – […]

The first “brand new newspaper for 30 years” just launched: ‘The New Day’. The pitch is nice: A small team of 25 staff. Gender neutral, politically neutral, & focused on positivity. It sounds like a very light, non-business version of the FT. It was free for the first day, will be 25p for the first 2 weeks, […]

Here are the results of a survey of 1,044 people in the UK asking whether the UK government should carry out air strikes against ISIS in Syria. The exact question wording was as follows: “Should the UK Government carry out air strikes against ISIS in Syria?” All answers were gathered between 13:52 & 19:40 on Wednesday 2nd, December 2015, […]

Here’s a very short tale about spending what looks like millions on launching a digital product, without paying attention to the basics of digital marketing. It is about “Electric Jukebox”, a service that has just been launched, with Stephen Fry, Robbie Williams, Sheryl Crow, and various other celebrities on board. Electric Jukebox is billed as a simple […]